Busy as Mall of America on Black Friday

I also hope you get better mom. I don't like it when you are sick. You keep working even though you shouldn't. But, that's the life of a mom, right? My comp's been half sick for like two weeks now. We've gone to the doctor twice and put ourselves on a diet in order to help him, but we are still in the process of getting better. Hopefully, he gets better this week so that we can work on achieving our norms of excellence.

That's a big thing for us right now, norms of excellence. President established this system a long time ago where every three months, we, the missionaries, established "norms" that we strive to achieve for three key indicators (baptismal dates, investigators in sacrament meeting, and lessons with a member). The problem is, he wasn't quite clear in exactly what he wanted to achieve with these normas, so the missionaries, of course, immediately confused the concept of a norma with the concepts of a goal. A norma, to be clear, is something that we achieve on a weekly basis. It is the MINIMUM. A goal, is something you put to raise your sight and your production. It is the MAXIMUM of what you believe you can achieve. Finally, this past week, they clarified everything. Now we have to achieve our norms on a weekly basis. It's a tough, but valuable change. The norms are going to start to mean something for us now.

We didn't have the baptism we wanted this week, but that was just because the dad of ================== wants to go and he can't until the 23rd. The dad, by the way, is the non-member who was sort of blocking the path for the last three years. We graciously changed the date for him, even though that means that our 23rd is going ot be as busy as the Mall of America on Black Friday. On the 23rd, we also happen to have a conference with a seventy (Elder Martinez) in Oaxaca. Three hourse away from Huajuapan. That means on the 23rd, we will be listening to a conference until like 2, then we'll have to jump straight on a bus to go to Huajuapan so that we can be there by 7, which is when the baptism is supposed to start, and maybe sometime in there we'll have time to eat. I hope.

Well, I love you all. You'll do great in your new calling mom. I'll see you in two years!

Love,

Elder Johnson